Here's some more far-out outsider doom metal from Russia, who seems to be producing most of the really messed up sounding doom that I've been listening to lately. In keeping with the Russian tradition of mangling an english phrase for an album title, Behind A Side Of Times is the sixth album from the uber-prolific Flegethon, a one man band headed by a guy who goes by the name Oden. There's not a whole lot of background out there on Flegethon, despite the band's sizeable discography, and most of albums that the band has released have come out through the tiny Russian label Satanarsa Records. Behind A Side Of Times is one of the few exceptions, released through the cult doom label Marche Funebre in 2005. And it's pretty strange. The music is a weird mix of ambient noise, extreme funeral doom, and suicidal black metal, all combined into massive twenty-minute-plus epics of otherworldly dread. When Flegethon is at it's heaviest, the sound is a fuzzy, crushing sort of glacial doom metal with distant tympani and percussion booming in the distance, behind massive creeping minor key riffs bathed in distortion and tuned impossibly low, like a more ambient, abstract version of Thergothon or Skepticism, a kind of washed out funereal doom with barely perceptible percussion. Weird and cool enough, with song titles like "Shadow Of Other Reason Which Has Subordinated Time" and "The Certificate Of Existence Of The Great Race" that draw inspiration from the eldritch sci-fi horrors of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos...but from there the music mutates into an even more abstract sort of heaviness, with long passages of kosmiche keyboards shimmering in the blackness, expansive fields of drone and sheets of glitchy electronics, deep inhuman roars that continue even over the gleaming ambience. Often, the crushing guitars will drop out completely, leaving just the synthesizers and electronics swirling around a pounding slow-motion percussive blast, or minimal clean guitars will ring out over a stuttering industrial loop or chattering drum machine. The sound is bleak and cold, but there is also a strange alien beauty beneath the ambient doomdrift, a mutant combination of Skepticism, improv black metal weirdos Abruptum, the blackened industrial drone rock of Korperschwache, and some of Tangerine Dream's early stuff, draped in Lovecraftian imagery and culled from the vastness of space.

The disc sports some neat Skepticism-like artwork and comes in a printed slipcase. Awesome cosmic industrial ambient death doom!